


Excellent Audio for Discerning Listeners

by kirja_rouva



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: F/M, One-Shot, mature language, s02e08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 15:09:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9390386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirja_rouva/pseuds/kirja_rouva
Summary: My own take and expansion on Elliot and Angela's meeting on the subway. This could possibly be expanded even further, but we'll see how series 3 goes and whether or not the muse will visit me.





	

In the weak, contrived light of the subway she looks like me. She looks wan and strung out, exhausted by her own existence. She looks like me because her gaze goes right through me, the way I know I sometimes look at people. Me isn’t a good look for her. She isn’t speaking either, like me.

“I got your messages. Sorry it took me so long to get here.” How often have I been giving that excuse? Not just to anyone, but to Angela especially?

She nods my poor excuse for an apology away and looks to her left, down the length of the empty car. She looks so worried. Come to think of it, she’s looked troubled the last few times I’ve seen her, but I’ve been too wrapped up in my own problems to really notice. In her dark suit and with her blonde hair slicked back she looks harsh and controlling, but her face reveals that she’s close to cracking.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, months too late.

“Why did you start fsociety?” She counters in a soft and almost hurt tone of voice. There's no doubt, she knows absolutely that I'm behind all the chaos.

Surprise isn’t an emotion that you can wear away with use. It feels like my whole life has been one surprise after another, and each time it resurfaces it feels like the first time. Of course I know that my plans have been slowly unravelling, my mind going to shit, but I thought that I could at least keep all of this from Angela. For some reason I felt that she was not to be touched by this, but clearly…

“I didn’t want to involve you,” I say, trying to make it clear that my intentions towards her have always been pure.

My shitty excuse does nothing to alter the pain on her face. She leans forward as though to make our private words even more private. “An FBI agent came to my place,” she says in that strange calm voice that I’m still getting used to. I took that to mean _I know you didn’t mean to involve me, but you did anyway_.

That now-familiar sense of panic begins to form in my chest, the feeling I have always gotten when people have confronted me with a problem I've created. I’ve fucked up Angela’s life somehow, and I’m not entirely sure how since I’ve been hallucinating or in prison for what feels like forever. She’s my oldest friend, closer to me than Darlene, I can’t let anything bad happen to her. “I can fix this, okay? I’m gonna fix this—”

“I’m going to confess,” Angela breaks in, and she sounds terrified. “I’ve already called my lawyer—I’m on my way to meet her now.” Her face falls further and I can almost make out fissures spreading across her skin, growing until she nearly dissolves into powder in front of me. “I can’t keep pretending that this is going to go away. We can’t beat them! Trust me, I’ve tried. No matter what we do we will always lose to them. I’m going to tell them that I planted the femtocell.” She says the last part with no malice, but it still feels like she goading me. Her brief moment of bravado fades away quickly though. “I would never involve any of you, so I’m just going to own up for what I did. But sooner or later, Elliot, this will all catch up to you.”

It doesn’t matter how quick I am with computers, how smart people perceive me to be, I feel like there’s a glitch inside me that keeps me from processing people like everyone else. Angela knows this about me, and so is surely not hurt at my wide-eyed silence, but I wish I could voice the thoughts hurtling through my head.

How I am supposed to help the ones I care about when every step I take puts them in greater danger? This was my plan, and I hid in a cage while everyone else took all the risk. Apparently the risk had extended beyond my sister and our rag-tag group of deviants, and spread to envelop people I had purposefully kept on the fringes. I say "people", but I mean "person". Angela is the only other person in my life I wanted to keep out of this, because when it comes down to it, she's always been the only one.

She's the only one who saw the unfiltered madness of my mind and didn't turn away in fear or disgust; she's the only one who could coax me out of the places my mind took me; she's the only one who made an effort to look out for me once I entered the real world. Sure, All Safe was a shit job that I hated, but I stayed for her. I'll either regret or applaud that decision once I'm done with fsociety, with bringing down Evil Corp.

Darlene hadn't been as close to our dad as I had been, so his death didn't bring us closer together--it alienated us. Our mother's temperament drove Darlene away faster than it did me; I was too weak to go out on my own. But meeting Angela, a girl who had lost her mother the same way I'd lost my father, it saved me. In each other we recognised that same sadness and anger at the world, and our small minds and bodies didn't know how to focus these emotions. So we focused on each other, different though our lives were.

Angela was golden in society, I was shadowy, but that didn't seem to bother her. She made time for me; watched my favourite movies and got high with me. When I started to branch out into harder and more addictive drugs, she was there to pull me out of it. As I'm staring at her I'm realising how much I've missed her, I'm realising how much I've needed her in my life.

“I mean, fuck, we have to talk to each other on the subway,” Angela was saying. Yes, and we had to send each other disappearing cryptic messages to meet up in the first place. She used to be able to find me whenever I ran away, but either I've gotten better at running or she's gotten worse at seeking. “It’s a long way from getting high and watching Back to the Future 2.”

Unbidden, reactionary, I feel myself sort of smile. “Yeah, we never did get around to doing that.” The early days of fsociety were so much more hopeful--naive.

“Do you remember when I found you at the Queens museum? You were pacing….” Why does she have to remember this? Now? “And screaming at the staff because they couldn’t see whoever you said you were seeing. Was it your dad then, too, or was it someone else?”

Again, an inappropriate smile. Of course Angela would know all of this, I had allowed her to. The only difference is that she didn’t treat me like I was crazy, so I thought that I had hidden it from her. “I don’t remember that at all.”

“Elliot, I don’t know if you started all of this because of him, but whatever he is you can’t work with him. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that.”

Why had I bothered with all of those visits with Krista when I had Angela the whole time? She’d wanted to know what was bothering me, even more than Krista and for less selfish reasons. Would we still be sitting here if I’d been more open? Or would she have supported me through this and embedded herself in the roots of this madness? After all, I know that she's just as mad at Evil Corp as I am, just not as willing to self-destruct.

“You should probably get off here.” Angela’s voice brings me out of wherever I go to. Back from talking to you. You don't exist.

With a brief nod I stand as the train continues to slow into a stop and approach her, she rises as well and stands unmoving. My mind races back to the times I have touched her, held her, and realise that most of them had been voluntary; I had initiated nearly every contact with her. One of the only people in the world I want to touch and have touch me. With this in mind, I put my arms around her and pull her against me. I don’t want to leave her, and I feel as though she doesn’t want me to.

Her body against mine feels familiar, comforting. I want more of her, but this is where we always stop. Does she feel the same way? How long have I felt this way? Since high school, surely. It doesn't matter when, it feels like forever.

The train has nearly stopped, and I pull back so that I can see her face and she can see mine. My eyes get stuck at her mouth, and an urge I realise I’ve been fighting for years wells up. I can tell that she’s looking at me the same way, the way everyone looks before they kiss. This is where we always stop. The last brief times we've been able to be together--alone--this is where we've stopped.

There's something different about this moment, though. There's an air of fatalism and the end that pushes us both, like magnets, together. So I lean in and do what I suppose I've always wanted to do, and I kiss her. Just like holding her, this feels comforting and familiar and I never want it to end. She kisses me back immediately, and I feel her hand against the side of my face, anchoring me against her. It's all so familiar that I wonder if we've done this before, just when I was too drunk or high to remember.

The jolting of the train is ultimately what breaks us apart and I’m sad yet resigned to part from her. If either of us manage to get out of this, which I know we won’t, I’ll have this memory to fall back on and possibly revisit. A moment where it was just the two of us wanting each other at the same time, equally.


End file.
